Author Archives: Austin Shiner

Salumi starred in a composed salad along with pressed mozzarella, roasted peppers, cherry tomatoes, pickled banana peppers and vinaigrette last Wednesday in the Berkeley College dining hall. A salad unto itself, this antipasto melange paired well with lettuce, a traditional salad staple, to create a double salad, or salad upon salad, or a meta salad. »

Earthworms are the future of seafood. Not yet, but they will be. This future is aquaculture. I don’t aim to offend and befuddle fisheries’ scientists and sustainability czars. By free admission, aquaculture’s nasty reputation as a polluting and destructive industry is in many cases deserved. The feces and antibiotic clogged pools of intensive shrimp farming »

Vegetarians are not evil. There. I said it. Just last year I argued otherwise in the Yale Herald, dismissing vegetarianism as the childish product of poor self-control, faddism and cultural ignorance. I was wrong. To go veggie is a noble decision in pursuit of sustainability. The data doesn’t lie: Depending on the animal, every calorie »

This is a story about hand gestures and veal. Our waiter was well-shaven, compact and professional. He gracefully swept between tables as my parents and I entered the cave-like restaurant. Onto the cramped dining room floor we strode, non-Spanish speakers in Barcelona, city of uneven architecture and lisps. I was 11. And hungry. Spanish-language menus »

Beasts built of muscle and cunning, some weighing thousands of pounds, cleave the water. Huge nets, giant floating cages, enclose the animals in the open ocean. Fattened on mackerel and herring for years, the life of a farmed bluefin tuna seems cushy — until it’s flash frozen and shipped to Tokyo for auction. Despite aquaculture’s »

I need a culinary babysitter. You do, too. We need to be guided, scorned for misbehavior, and most importantly, we need to be told what to eat. Foodies and connoisseurs of sustainability may scoff at my prescription. Make no mistake: I don’t typically endorse gastronomic dictatorship. The influence of McDonald’s, agribusiness and the corn syrup »

Lightness. Weightlessness. Every bowl, tea scoop and scroll is gravity-resistant, resting contentedly against elegant tatami mats, fine-grained wood planks and cream-colored walls. All is still, every piece perfectly placed: Rearrangement, the perturbation of a single object, is sacrilege. Chanoyu, the spirit of 16th century Japanese tea culture, seeps through the walls and drips from each »

I anthropomorphize my cheese. L’Explorateur, the French triple crème that, in the words of my father, is everything Saint Andre strives to be, is fittingly adventurous, bold and assertive, a dashing, daring, type-A personality overachiever with the acerbic bravado of the stereotyped Frenchmen who make it. Saint Andre’s milky white pâté and thin, comparatively mild »

The only thing reminiscent of a “Circus” in Britney’s sixth studio album is her low, husky, almost lion-like growl. Unless your vision of a circus includes lascivious Britney strutting her “six-inch heels” and scanty “lace and leather” garb intoning: “all eyes on me / in the center of the ring.” In that case, this is »

I couldn’t say whether Martha Stewart actually likes football, yet each winter she dons a jersey, fires up the grill and leaves the patchouli candles inside. It’s an ambiance thing: The canonical Martha doesn’t inhale pork rinds or shotgun Pabst, but the game-day Martha sure does. Her guide to hors d’oeuvres is an extended lesson »

Even blog-cruising, newspaper-munching, “Economist”-digesting politicos don’t know Edward T. Schafer. He’s the current Secretary of Agriculture — I guess that explains it. But President-elect Obama has an unprecedented opportunity, as did JFK, to surround himself with a cabinet capable of palpable change. And although Rahm Emanuel might not admit it, the position of Secretary of »

Rachel Schiff ’10, one of three coordinators for Trans Awareness Week (TAW), knows the communicative power of art and the purpose it serves for the LGBT community. “Everyone can take something out of a figure drawing. And that personal experience, coupled with an artistic statement, can create connections between people who have never had to »